AllFreeNovel
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A few days later, I head to Grand Junction, Ennis Ainsley’s shoebox in tow. I asked Rory to come with me, but she said she had to make up some of the lessons she missed while we were gone.
She doesn’t have to work. I’ll take care of her, but I know better than to suggest that to her. She’ll go straight for my balls. Neither of us are ready for any kind of commitment. Not while so much is still up in the air regarding both our families.
I’m going to see Aunt Ruby’s old colleague—the same one who checked out the bones for us.
He works out of his home, and I drive up to the tiny brick ranch house on the outskirts of the city. I take the shoebox, exit the car, walk up the pathway, and knock.
The door opens, and a gray-haired man stands before me. “Brock Steel, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“I’m Gordon Jackson. Come on in.”
Gordon Jackson is wearing joggers and a T-shirt, no shoes or socks. I enter, and a miniature schnauzer barks at my heels.
“Go on, Theo,” Jackson says.
I bend down and give Theo a few scratches behind his ears. “He doesn’t bother me. I love dogs.”
“Well, you’ve done it now,” Jackson says. “Now that you’ve shown him you’ll pet him, he won’t leave you alone.”
I chuckle. “That’s okay.”
He glances at the box. “That’s the stuff?”
“It is.”
“Follow me. We’ll take it down to my lab.”
We head through a short hallway to a door. Jackson opens it. His lab is apparently in his basement. We walk down twelve steps, and he flips the light switch.
And I stop my jaw from dropping.
This is a lab all right. There’s equipment down here that I don’t recognize. I may have wandered into a secret government complex.
“Let’s see what we’ve got here.” Jackson takes the box from me and sits down on the stool in front of what looks like a workbench but is much more intricate.
“Have a seat.” He gestures to the stool next to him. Then he puts on a pair of glasses, except they’re not glasses. They have something like jewelers’ loupes attached to them, so they’re clearly some kind of magnifying device. Then he straps on some white rubber gloves.
He pulls out the first item, the perfume. Examines it. “You’re not looking for fingerprints?”
“No,” I say.
“Good, because most of these are old, except for a few that appear very new.”
“That would be my girlfriend and me. We’re the ones who found the stuff and brought it back from London.”
“Got it.” He looks at the perfume bottle from all angles. “Definitely nothing on here that I could get DNA from.”
Next he pulls out the cassette tape. He examines it the same way, looking at it from every angle with his magnifiers. He sets it down after a few moments. “Nothing here either.”
“No. We figured our best bets were the hair tie or the panties.”
He carefully pulls the hair tie out of the box. “I don’t want to disturb anything that is attached to it. You do have some hairs here. But if they’re over sixty years old…” He shakes his head.
“We know. It’s a real long shot.”
“It is.” He examines the hair tie and carefully extracts the hairs from it, looking at them closely. Then he removes the magnifiers from his face and turns to a microscope.
